Beauty and its Complexity
The first stanza of the poem is all about beauty. However, Chaucer juxtaposes several different kinds of beauty, some of which seem mutually exclusive. At first, the speaker describes Rosamond as “all beauty shrine.” The shrine immediately suggests Christian themes, and specifically alludes to the richly built tombs of medieval saints, which worshippers would have visited in order to ask the saint to entreat God on their behalf. By implicitly likening the speaker’s love for Rosamond to the virtuous person’s love for God, the opening line suggests that it is a pure and holy feeling. Indeed, the heavenly beauty here need not even be physical, as the poet doesn’t yet allude to Rosamond’s appearance. In this opening line, it seems possible that the speaker admires Rosamond’s spiritual beauty, in a manner totally in line with his love of God. However, the next lines complicate this comparison by invoking different modes of beauty. Chaucer compares Rosamond to a glorious shining crystal and to a ruby. These objects are valuable, but not associated with virtue or religious devotion. He also makes explicit that Rosamond is beautiful because she physically resembles the gems. He goes on to admire the appearance of her merry and playful personality, which is at odds with the seriousness of a religious shrine. These contrasting descriptions of Rosamond suggest that a woman’s beauty can’t be reduced to something virtuous and Godlike.
The Pain and Pleasure of Love
Throughout the poem, Chaucer uses extreme language to describe the pain of love. The speaker describes himself as wounded by love, and even refers to weeping over the impossibility of consummating his relationship with Rosamond. The final stanza begins with a strange comparison between the feeling of being in love, and a pike, or fish, being cooked in sauce. Although not explicitly painful, the dead fish suggests that love is an all-consuming and even self-destructive feeling. Although the images are dramatic, feelings of pain are an understandable response to having one’s affections go unrequited. However, Chaucer also suggests that love itself is a remedy for the pain of desire. When the speaker watches Rosamond dance, her joy is an “ointment” of his love-wound. Ironically, the very thing that hurts him (his desire), also cures him, because seeing Rosamond makes him so happy. By the end of the poem, the speaker has come to describe his love as an “amorous pleasure.” Ultimately, the pleasure of love outweighs the suffering, even when the beloved does not return the lover’s affection. As a result, Rosamond’s own feelings become relatively unimportant. Regardless of how she feels, the speaker will not only remain in “thrall” to her, but he will enjoy the experience. It would be much more painful to leave her behind, where he would be left to suffer his wound without the “ointment” of seeing her.
The Absurdity of Love
The speaker’s ironic dependence on Rosamond to allay the painful feelings of desire she herself incites speaks to Chaucer’s cynical perspective on love. In “To Rosamond,” love doesn’t get anywhere. It’s just a mess of painful and pleasant feelings in which the speaker dramatically wallows, without any regard for Rosamond’s own attitude. Rather than a way of relating to someone else, in this poem, love is basically a form of self-absorption, as the speaker indulges his own “amorous pleasure” despite Rosamond’s continued lack of interest. Chaucer’s critical attitude towards love also comes through in his use of increasingly absurd metaphors. Comparing the beloved to gemstones is pretty typical. Comparing her to an ointment seems more unusual to us now, but seeing the beloved as a kind of healer was another trope of medieval love poetry. However, his comparison of the lover to a pike boiled in sauce is patently absurd. Although other love poets compared the beloved to a fish they want to catch, that fish was always alive. The boiled fish transposes that trope from the splendor of the sea to the humble setting of the kitchen, and suggests that although the speaker sees his affection for Rosamond as something extraordinary, in reality it is part of the unglamorous, everyday world.
